Oh, the humanity! The angst! The melodrama! This show ranks up there among the most melodramatic anime of all time. Take the love-and-death angst of Weiss Kreuz and multiply it by a thousand, and you might be close to Zetsuai. It's eerily similar in that regard to those old Victorian romances, with their mysterious wasting illnesses, self-sacrifice and high tragedy. Either Koji or Izumi (or both) are almost constantly injured or sick...so the other can care for him tenderly, I assume. It's so overdone it's ridiculous; Izumi finds Koji drunk and lying in the rain, takes him home and nurses him back to health....then Izumi comes down with pneumonia, then Koji gets hit by a car and breaks his arm, then Koji goes and stands in the rain again, then Koji gets hit by a car again and is in a coma, then Izumi's old wound starts acting up....you get the idea. The hospital should set aside a permanent Angst Room for these guys, since they're always sick or hurt. And of course they've also got to be constantly doubting their relationship, agonizing over their feelings, doing the Miaka trick of 'I'll run away because I only bring grief and trouble to people', and threatening to kill themselves. Ah yes, no cliché is left unabused. There's only about 2 minutes in the entire both OVAs that Koji and Izumi are actually happy. But we can't have that, so something awful has to happen again.

Another thing that makes it difficult to enjoy this show is the character design, which is done in that dumb spider-boy style that's so prevalent in yaoi manga: ridiculously long and spindly limbs, absurdly wide shoulders, pointy chins, super-long necks, and fingers so long they look like spider legs. It's kind of hard to enjoy watching bishounen make out when they look like they've been horribly mutated in some kind of freak accident. You could see a bit of this style in FAKE, but it was rather toned down; in Zetsuai & Bronze they just look disturbing. When you're screaming at the screen for the bishounen to put his shirt back ON, you know there's something wrong. Bronze is drawn in a slightly different, more angular style, but they still look like mutants.

And to top it all off, there's absolutely no sex (just a couple of very tame fondling shots) in either Zetsuai or Bronze, which makes the unbelievable melodrama all the more difficult to put up with. In retrospect, though, what else could one expect from a show called 'Hopeless Love'...although perhaps it should have been called 'Invalid Love' or 'This Is Some Shitty Love'. Anyways, if you like high tragedy and lots of anguished romance, you might really like this show. Those with a low tolerance for cheese, however, should stay away.